Cooking with Blobby

It seems I'm a sucker for meals that include noodles. Anymore, no matter how I somewhat / kinda try, I seem to end up with pasta in the dish. 

I mean, great, if I were carbo-loading.  PT works me hard, but not to that degree. 

Anyhoo........since technically spaghetti was originally from China, I'm taking it a little north to Mongolia with Mongolian Noodles with Beef. Or something like that. 

It's a bit ingredient heavy, but not horribly so and it really comes together in 30 minutes, or a little less, including the prep. 

Honestly if you concurrently do the noodles and meat it's pretty quick. Peeling and mincing the garlic was the most labour intensive thing going on here. 

And just so you know, I didn't bother with a picture of cooking the pasta. I won't again for a pasta dish. I mean - c'mon.........you should know how to do that without illustration. 

Ingredients 

1lb lean ground beef 

1/2 tsp ground ginger

5 garlic clove minced 

1/3 cup brown sugar 

1/4 cup beef broth 

1/3 cup low sodium soy sauce (I forgot to put in the above pic)

1/4 cup hoisin sauce

1/2 tsp black pepper 

red pepper flakes optional noodles - optional.....or is it?  Just do it to taste. 

10 oz linguine,

1 tsp cornstarch 

2 tsp water 

4 green onions sliced

Instructions 

In a large skillet with high sides brown the ground beef on the stovetop. 

Add the ginger and garlic the last 2 minutes of browning the ground beef. Break up the meat as it cooks. While the ground beef is cooking, cook the pasta according to the package instructions. (I recommend you do not salt the water. Soy and Hoisin have more than enough sodium, even if using the low sodium) Drain. 

Drain the ground beef (I used 90% / 10% and had almost nothing to drain) and return it to the skillet along with the soy sauce, beef broth, brown sugar, red pepper flakes, pepper, and hoisin sauce. Stir to combine. 

Dissolve the cornstarch in the water and add it to the ground beef mixture. Stir and bring the mixture to a low boil.  As there isn't a lot of sauce when looking at it, this thickening is tres important, as it will make it thick enough to cling to the noodles. 

After the sauce has thickened slightly add the drained noodles to the beef mixture. Stir to combine. Allow the noodles to sit in the sauce a few minutes to absorb flavor. 

Serve hot with a garnish of sliced green onions.

I might have used too many red pepper flakes. I mean, it was good, but my tongue felt it a bit, though that could partly be due to the ground ginger(?).  And for what I would consider a small amount of ginger, you can taste it - but there are loads of flavours coming through here. 

710 really liked it and said it should go into our rotation, which I'm happy to do. Not too too often, but it's a keeper. 

This is supposed to be 4 servings, but it might be closer to 3 - but you know, we're growing boys, so maybe it should be 4.